PLEASE SEE OUR COMPANION HISTORIES



132 Hudson Place




  • Completed in 1927 on Lot 379 in Tract 8320
  • Original commissioner: grocer William G. Young
  • Designer and contractor: Chisholm, Fortine & Meikle
  • On December 18, 1926, the Los Angeles Times reported that a residence was to be built at 132 South Hudson Place for "W. Young" by builders Chisholm, Fortine & Meikle (Alexander D. Chisholm, William H. Fortine, and Evan L. Meikle). No specific architect is mentioned; the designer would have been on the staff of the contractor or subcontracted by it
  • William George Young was the second of five sons of Belgian-born Peter Young, a southern Illinois cattle farmer. The eldest, John George Young, arrived in Southern California with his parents in 1887, opening a meat market in Los Angeles the next year. Peter Young established a ranch in the Eagle Rock Valley, with his namesake son joining John as a proprietor of the market, the success of which drew their three older brothers, George Frederick, Charles, and William, into partnering in the establishment of Young's Market Company in early 1906. Very much still in business, Young's focus shifted after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 from meats and fine foods to the marketing, sales, and distribution of wines and spirits
  • William G. Young married Bertha Mahlstedt of Los Angeles on April 14, 1910; John Mahlsted Young arrived on November 20, 1912, Willa Katherine on July 22, 1923. Prior to moving into 132 Hudson Place, the Youngs were living nearby at 212 South Highland Avenue. Mrs. Young died at 132 on April 12, 1944, age 61. Nine months later there was a new Mrs. William G. Young


With 20 outlets in operation in Los Angeles and San Diego, Young's Market Company opened its
new headquarters and chief retail outlet in February 1925. Charles F. Plummer was architect
of the building, still standing at the southwest corner of West Seventh and Union Avenue.


  • On January 4, 1945, the Times reported that William G. Young had married Elizabeth Richardson Hannaford the day before at the Episcopal Church of the Angels at the near edge of Pasadena. Mrs. Hannaford was the widow of Frederick Sale Hannaford, who died in 1927 and with whom she'd had a daughter and two sons. At the time of the wedding Mrs. Hannaford lived with her mother on Mount Royal Drive in Eagle Rock, of which the Hannafords had been pioneer settlers, as had the Youngs. William Young and Elizabeth Hannaford had known each other since a young age through various familial connections; his sister Clara was married to Arthur G. Hannaford, brother of Elizabeth's first husband, that couple also living on Mount Royal Drive. Per the Times, the newly married Youngs would be "at home at 132 S. Hudson Place after Feb. 15."
  • The Department of Building and Safety issued William Young a permit on August 17, 1938, for the addition of a bathroom to 132 Hudson Place. A permit to repair damage after a small fire at 132 was issued to Young on December 4, 1956
  • William G. Young was still living at 132 Hudson Place when he died of a heart ailment at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica on September 7, 1963. A founder of the Wilshire Country Club, the greens over which he had an eastward view from his house, he had turned 82 the month before
  • Elizabeth Young appears to have retained possession of 132 Hudson Place until 1969; classified ads had begun appearing in the Times in late 1967 offering the house for sale ("On Golf Course. Fine English. 5 Bdr. 5 Ba. Library. Perf. Cond."). Having been born in Minnesota on Christmas Day 1886, Mrs. Young would die at nearly 90 up in Placerville in 1976
  • Mr. and Mrs. Lionel Edward Ogden had succeeded Elizabeth Young as the owner of 132 Hudson Place. Lionel Ogden, son of an Englishman and a Californian, was married to Victoria Reyes Cotton, a woman as well-connected as her mother-in-law, née Mary Winston; the Cottons were proud of their participation in the early development of the Southland in the way of provincial settlers expecting condescension from East Coast arbiters of who's who. The Ogdens' daughter Janice Lucy, born on May 31, 1940, was featured in a story in the Times on August 5, 1990, with a no-doubt subject-supplied biography: "Janice Ogden Carpenter's family was here before there was a Los Angeles—for that matter, before there was a United States of America or an independent country of Mexico.... Both her mother and father...were descended from families who migrated from Spain in the 18th Century, receiving land grants from the Spanish Crown and intermarrying and flourishing for several generations before the Yankees arrived.... On the maternal side, she is descended from the Dominguez, Sepulveda, Nieto, Cota, Carson and Cotton families; on her paternal side, from the Ortego, Carrillo, Arguello, Bandini and Windston clans." The article proceeded to name each illustrious forebear even more to the point of overkill, when, perhaps, the apparently more-land-than-cash Ogdens were on the trajectory of the Beragons in James M. Cain's Mildred Pierce. In 1950 Lionel Ogden was enumerated as a water-heater salesman living with his wife and daughter in a fairly modest Colonial at 850 South Windsor south of Wilshire Boulevard; curiously, Lionel E. Ogden was still listed there in the 1973 Los Angeles city directory while a "Lucy E. Cotton" was listed as occupying 132 Hudson Place
  • On August 18, 1969, the Department of Building and Safety issued Lionel Ogden a permit for a 40-by-22-foot swimming pool at 132 Hudson Place; two days later a permit was issued to the Ogdens for various small remodelngs design by architect Stephen Stepanian
  • Lionel and Victoria Ogden had been married on September 6, 1930, at Cotton Point, the San Clemente estate built by her father, oilman Henry Hamilton Cotton, in 1924. It was the sale of Cotton Point in 1969 to none other than recently elected President Richard Nixon—it became his "Western White House"—that may have financed the Ogdens' upgrade to a house in Hancock Park. Cotton Point was turned over to the Nixons in July. It is unclear as to how long they retained 132, though it seems to have been in the family until Victoria died. After a long illness Lionel Ogden died in Ojai at the age of 75 on August 15, 1980; his widow was 81 when she expired in Los Angeles on October 12, 1989. They were buried in the Catholic Old Guard's Calvary Cemetery in East Los Angeles; when their daughter died at the age of 67 she would be laid to rest alongside her parents
  • The family currently occupying 132 Hudson Place in 2020 arrived in 1990, that year carrying out some interior renovations and adding a small rear two-story addition


Illustrations: Private Collection; LAPL